The Fastest Repealers in the West

In 1979 a law professor named Geoffrey Palmer wrote that New Zealand had the fastest lawmakers in the West. In 2024, he updated the diagnosis: "We've gone from being the fastest lawmakers in the west to the fastest repealers in the west." Palmer would know. He went on to be Prime Minister, and the machine he described in Unbridled Power? is the one we still run: one chamber of Parliament, no upper house, no written constitution, and almost nothing a government with a one-vote majority can't do before lunch. Most democracies have speed bumps. We bought the racing package. Part 1 of this series counted the bill: well over a billion dollars in directly sunk and cancellation costs from a single change of government, plus billions more spent redoing and replacing. This part is about why it keeps happening, because the answer isn't that we elect unusually flighty people. The answer is the company structure. A company with no board Stay with the picture from Part 1: New Zealand as a company…